MYTHOLOGIES AND FOLK-TALES.
[Sidenote: Diversity of myths.]
If we found it difficult to reduce to a consistent simplicity the
religious ideas of the Aryan races, what hope have we to find any thread
through the labyrinth of their unbridled imagination in dealing with
more fanciful subjects? The world is all before them where to choose;
nature, in her multitudinous works and ever-changing shows, is at hand
to give breath to the faculty of myth-making, and lay the foundation of
all the stories which have ever been told. The two elements concurrent
to the manufacture of mythologies are the varying phenomena in nature,
and that which is called the anthropomorphic (personifying) faculty in
man. I do not mean by this that all myths represent natural appearances.
Some simply relate events, real human experiences; all that is mythic
about such stories is that they are _misplaced_. Some one has gone
through the adventures, but not the person of whom they are told. Other
tales transfer in a like fashion human experiences to beings who are not
human, to animals, to trees and streams, maybe even to implements, to
spades and ploughs, to hatchets, swords, or ships. All these may be
subject of mere tale-telling. But what I understand by mythology are
the stories related of the gods--at all events, stories of supernatural
beings who are almost gods. And among the Aryan folk, as the gods are in
almost every instance the personifications of phenomena or powers of
nature, the myths of widest extension were necessarily occupied with
these.
Religion being the greatest concern of man, the myths which allied
themselves most closely to his religious ideas would be those which
maintained the longest life and most universal acceptance. In reviewing
some of the Aryan myths--in a hasty and general review as it must needs
be--the preceding chapter will serve to guide us to the myths most
closely connected with religious notions, which have a chief claim upon
our attention. Indeed, reading in a converse manner, it was the fact
that so many myths clung around certain natural phenomena which allowed
us, with proper reservation, to point these out as the phenomena which
held the most intimate place in men’s minds and hearts. _With proper
reservations_, because the highest, most abstracted god does not lend
himself as a subject for the myth-making faculty. He stands apart from
the polytheistic circle: below him stand the nature-gods who are also
the heroes of the mythologies.
And now, with a backward glance to what has been already written, we may
expect the chief myth systems to divide themselves into certain classes
corresponding with the god--or natural phenomenon--that is their
concern. We may expect to find myths relating especially to the labours
of the sun, like those of Heracles and Thorr, or to the wind, like that
of Hermes stealing the cattle of Apollo, or to the earth sleeping in the
embrace of winter, or sorrowing for the loss of her greenery, or joying
again in her recovered life. And again we may look to find myths more
intimately concerned with death, and with the looked-for future of the
soul. These will mingle like mingling streams, but we shall often be
able to trace their origin.
But, to begin with, do not suppose that, if I say that a natural
phenomenon has given rise to a story, I mean to say that the story could
not have arisen except through this natural phenomenon. Or, to put it in
plainer language, do not suppose that if I say that this or that
adventure is related of the sun or of the wind, I mean that the
adventure was never heard of before the sun or wind was worshipped as a
god or idealized as a hero. If Indra, or Apollo, is called the
serpent-slayer, I do not mean that it is by the battle of the sun and
the clouds that men got the idea of slaying serpents. If the wind is
said to ride a-horseback over hill and dale, if the thunder-god is said
to hurl his hammer at the mountain-tops, I do not mean that men never
thought of horses or battle-hammers till they began to make stories
about the wind and sun. What I do mean is that certain special forms of
the myths related, _as we now see them_, were told of the Aryan god who
was some phenomenon of nature--the sun or whatever he might be. It is
necessary to give this word of caution, because the relationship of
mythology to religion has sometimes, by recent writings upon the
subject, been a good deal confused and obscured.
The diversity of the natural phenomena which give them rise will not in
any way hinder the myths from reproducing the _human_ elements which
have, since the world began held their pre-eminence in romance and
history. There will be love-stories, stories of battle and victory, of
magic and strange disguises, of suddenly acquired treasure, and, most
attractive of all to the popular mind, stories of princes and princesses
whose princedom is hidden under a servile station or beggar’s
gaberdine, and of heroes who allow their heroism to rust for a while in
strange inaction, that
‘Imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at.’
Not necessarily because such heroes _were_ the sun, but rather that the
tales, appealing so intimately to the common sympathies of human nature,
attach themselves pre-eminently to the great natural hero, the sun-god.
[Sidenote: Sun-myths.]
To begin, then, with the sun-god. His love-stories relate most commonly
the pursuit of the dawn, a woman, by the god of day. She flies at the
approach of the sun; or, if the two are married in early morning, when
the day advances, the dawn dies or the sun leaves her to pursue his
allotted journey. We read how Apollo pursued Daphnê, while she still
fled from him, and at last, praying to the gods, was changed into a
laurel, which ever afterwards remained sacred to the son of Lêtô. There
is nothing new in the story; it might be related of any hero. Yet, as we
find Greek art so often busy with it, we might guess that it had
obtained for some reason a hold more than commonly firm upon the popular
imagination. And when we turn from the Greek to the Sanskrit we are able
to unravel the myth and show it, so far as the names are concerned,
peculiar to the sun-god. Daphnê (it is believed) is the Sanskrit Ahanâ,
that is to say, the Dawn.
A tenderer love-story is that which speaks of the sun and the dawn as
united at the opening of the day, but of the separation which follows
when the sun reveals himself in his true splendour. The parting,
however, will not be eternal, for the sun in the evening shall sink into
the arms of the west, as in the morning he left those of the east--all
the physical appearances at sundown will correspond with those of the
dawn--so in poetical language he will be said to return to his love
again at the evening of life. In right accord with its natural origin
and native attractiveness, we find this story repeated almost
identically as regards its chief incidents by all the branches of the
Aryan family. For an Indian version of it the reader may consult the
story of Urva_s_i and Pururavas, told by Mr. Max Müller from one of the
Vedas.[114] Urva_s_i is a fairy who falls in love with Pururavas, a
mortal, and consents to become his wife, on condition that she should
never see him without his royal garment on, ‘for this is the manner of
women.’ For a while they lived together happily; but the Gandhavas, the
fairy beings to whom Urva_s_i belonged, were jealous of her love for a
mortal, and they laid a plot to separate them. ‘Now, there was a ewe
with two lambs tied to the couch of Urva_s_i and Pururavas, and the
fairies stole one of them, so that Urva_s_i upbraided her husband and
said, “They steal my darlings as though I lived in a land where there is
no hero, and no man.” And Pururavas said, “How can that be a land
without heroes or men where I am?” and naked he sprang up. Then the
Gandhavas sent a flash of lightning, and Urva_s_i saw her husband naked
as by daylight. Then she vanished. “I come back,” she said; and went.’
Cupid loves Psyche as Pururavas Urva_s_i, but here the story is so far
changed that the woman breaks the condition laid upon their union. Not
this time by accident, but from the evil counselling of her two sisters,
Psyche disobeys her husband. They have long been married, but she has
never seen his face; and doubts begin to arise lest some horrid
monster, and not a god, may be the sharer of her couch. So she takes the
lamp, and when she deems her husband is fast locked in sleep, gazes upon
the face of the god of love.
‘But as she turned at last
To quench the lamp, there happed a little thing
That quenched her new delight, for flickering,
The treacherous flame cast on his shoulder fair
A burning drop; he woke, and seeing her there,
The meaning of that sad sight knew full well;
Nor was there need the piteous tale to tell.’[115]
Here, it is true, we have wandered away from the adventures of the sun.
Cupid or Eros is in no sense a sun-god; nor has Psyche any proved
connection with Ushas, the Dawn. Once a sun-myth does not mean always a
sun-myth.[116] So much the contrary, that it is part of our business to
show how stories, first appropriated to Olympus or Asgard, may descend
to take their place among the commonest collection of nursery tales. It
is the case with this myth of the Dawn. The reader’s acquaintance with
nursery literature has probably already anticipated the kinship to be
claimed by one of the most familiar childish legends. But as one more
link to rivet the bond of union between _Urvasi and Pururavas_ and
_Beauty and the Beast_, let us look at a story of Swedish origin called
_Prince Hatt under the Earth_.
‘There was once, very very long ago, a king who had three daughters, all
exquisitely fair, and much more amiable than other maidens, so that
their like was not to be found far or near. But the youngest princess
excelled her sisters, not only in beauty, but in goodness of heart and
kindness of disposition. She was consequently greatly beloved by all,
and the king himself was more fondly attached to her than to either of
his other daughters.
‘It happened one autumn that there was a fair in a town not far from the
king’s residence, and the king himself resolved on going to it with his
attendants. When on the eve of departure, he asked his three daughters
what they would like for fairings, it being his constant custom to make
them some present on his return home. The two elder princesses began
instantly to enumerate precious things of curious kinds; one would have
this, the other that; but the youngest daughter asked for nothing. At
this the king was surprised, and asked her whether she would not like
some ornament or other; but she answered that she had plenty of gold and
jewels. When the king, however, would not desist from urging her, she at
length said, “There is one thing which I would gladly have, if only I
might venture to ask it of my father.” “What may that be?” inquired the
king; “say what it is, and if it be in my power you shall have it.” “It
is this,” replied the princess, “I have heard talk of the _three singing
leaves_, and them I wish to have before anything else in the world.” The
king laughed at her for making so trifling a request, and at length
exclaimed, “I cannot say that you are very covetous, and would rather by
half that you had asked for some greater gift. You shall, however, have
what you desire, though it should cost me half my realm.” He then bade
his daughters farewell and rode away.’
Of course he goes to the fair, and on his way home happens to hear the
three singing leaves, ‘which moved to and fro, and as they swayed there
came forth a sound such as it would be impossible to describe.’ The king
was glad to have found what his daughter had wished for, and was about
to pluck them, but the instant he stretched forth his hand towards them,
they withdrew from his grasp, and a powerful voice was heard from under
the earth saying, ‘Touch not my leaves.’ ‘At this the king was somewhat
surprised, and asked who it was, and whether he could not purchase the
leaves for gold or good words. The voice answered, “I am _Prince Hatt
under the Earth_, and you will not get my leaves either with good or bad
as you desire. Nevertheless I will propose to you one condition.” “What
condition is that?” asked the king with eagerness. “It is,” answered the
voice, “that you promise me the first living thing that you meet when
you return to your palace.”’ As we anticipate, the first thing which he
meets is his youngest daughter, who therefore is left with lamentation
under the hazel bush: and, as is its wont on such occasions, the ground
opens, and she finds herself in a beautiful palace. Here she lives long
and happily with Prince Hatt, upon condition that she shall never see
him. But at last she is permitted to pay a visit to her father and
sisters; and her stepmother succeeds in awakening her curiosity and her
fears, lest she should really be married to some horrid monster. The
princess thus allows herself to be persuaded to strike a light and gaze
on her husband while he is asleep. Of course, just as her eyes have
lighted upon a beautiful youth he awakes, and as a consequence of her
disobedience--(here the story alters somewhat)--he is struck blind, and
the two are obliged to wander over the earth, and endure all manner of
misfortunes before Prince Hatt’s sight is at last restored.
The sun is so apt to take the place of an almost super-human hero, that
most of the stories of such when they are purely mythical relate some
part of the sun’s daily course and labours. Thus in the Greek, Perseus,
Theseus, Jason, are in the main sun-heroes, though they mingle with
their histories tales of real human adventure. One of the most easily
traceable sun-stories is that of Perseus and the Gorgon. The later
representations of Medusa in Greek art give her a beautiful dead face
shrouded by luxurious snaky tresses; but the earlier art presents us
with a round face, distorted by a hideous grin from ear to ear, broad
cheeks, low forehead, over which curl a few flattened locks. We at once
see the likeness of this face to the full moon; a likeness which,
without regard to mythology, forces itself upon us; and then the true
story of Perseus flashes upon us as the extinction of the moon by the
sun’s light. This is the baneful Gorgon’s head, the full moon, which so
many nations superstitiously believed could exert a fatal power over the
sleeper; and when slain by the son of Danaê, it is the pale ghostlike
disc which we see by day. It is very interesting to see how the Greeks
made a myth of the moon in its--one may say--literal unidealized aspect,
in addition to the countless more poetical myths which spoke of the moon
as a beautiful goddess, queen of the night, the virgin huntress
surrounded by her pack of dogs--the stars. In the instance of Medusa
these two aspects of one natural appearance are brought into close
relationship, for Athênê--who is sometimes a moon-goddess--wears the
Gorgon’s head upon her shield.
As we have passed on to speak of the moon, we may as
[Sidenote: Moon-myths.]
well notice some of the other moon-myths: though in the case of these,
as of the myths of the sun, our only object must be to show the
characteristic forms which this order of tales assumes, so that the way
may be partly cleared for their detection; nothing like a complete list
of the infinitely varied shapes which the same nature-story can assume
being possible. One of the most beautiful of moon-myths is surely the
tale of Artemis (Diana) and Endymion. This last, the beautiful shepherd
of Latmos,[117] by his name ‘He who enters,’ is in origin the sun just
entering the _cave_ of night.[118] The moon looking upon the setting sun
is a signal for his long sleep, which in the myth becomes the sleep of
death. The same myth reappears in the well-known German legend of
Tannhäuser. He enters a mountain, the Venusberg, or Mount of Venus, and
is not sent to sleep, but laid under an enchantment by the goddess
within. In other versions of the legend the mountain is called not
Venusberg but Horelberg, and from this name we trace the natural origin
of the myth. For there was an old moon-goddess of the Teutons called
Horel or Hursel. She therefore is the enchantress in this case; and the
Christian knight falls a victim to the old German moon-goddess. It has
been supposed that the story of the massacre of St. Ursula and her
eleven thousand virgins--whose bones they show to this day at
Cologne--arose out of the same nature-myth; and that this St. Ursula is
also none other than Hursel, followed by her myriad troop of stars.[119]
* * * * *
The northern religion, or say the old German creed its
[Sidenote: Northern sun-myths, etc.]
first cousin, has been fruitful in myths which were repeated all through
the Middle Ages and out of which the greater part of our popular tales
have sprung. Thor, originally the sun and now the god of thunder, the
champion of men, and the enemy of the Jötuns (giants), becomes in later
days Jack the Giant Killer; Odin, by a like descent, the Wandering Jew,
or the Pied Piper of Hamelin. And thus through a hundred popular legends
we can detect the natural appearance out of which they originally
sprang. Let us look at them first in their old heathen forms. Thor, the
hero and sun-god, the northern Heracles, distinguishes himself as the
implacable enemy of the rime-giants and frost-giants, the powers of cold
and darkness; and to carry on his hostilities, he makes constant
expeditions, ‘farings’ into giant-land, or Jötunheim, as it is called;
and these expeditions generally end in the thorough discomfiture of the
strong but rude and foolish personifications of barren nature.
One of these, the adventure to the house of Thrym,[120] is to recover
Thor’s hammer, which has been stolen by the giant and hidden many miles
beneath the earth. A spy is sent from Asgard (the city of the gods) into
Jötunheim, and brings back word that Thrym will not give up his prize
unless Freyja--goddess of Spring and Beauty--be given to him as his
bride; and at first Thor proposes this alternative to Freyja herself,
little, as may be guessed, to her satisfaction.
‘Wroth was Freyja and with fury fumed,
All the Æsir’s hall under her trembled;
Broken flew the famed Brisinga necklace.’[121]
But the wily Loki settles the difficulty. Thor shall to Jötunheim clad
in Freyja’s weeds,
‘Let by his side, keys jingle, and a neat coif set on his head.’
So taking Loki with him clad as a serving-maid, the god fares to Thrym’s
house, as though he were the looked-for bride. It must, one would
suppose, have been an anxious time for Thor and Loki, while unarmed they
sate in the hall of the giant; for the hero could not avoid raising some
suspicions by his unwomanly appearance and demeanour. He alone devoured,
we are told, an ox, eight salmon, ‘and all the sweetmeats women should
have,’ and he drank eight ‘scalds’ of mead. Thrym naturally exclaimed
that he never saw brides eat so greedily or drink so much mead. But the
‘all-crafty’ Loki sitting by, explained how this was owing to the hurry
Freyja was in to behold her bridegroom, which left her no time to eat
for the eight nights during which she had been journeying there. And so
again when Thrym says--
‘Why are so piercing Freyja’s glances?
Methinks that fire burns from her eyes,’
Loki explains that for the same reason she had not slept upon her
journey; and the foolish, vain giant is gulled once more. At last the
coveted prize, the hammer, was brought in to consecrate the marriage,
and ‘Thor’s soul laughed in his breast, when the fierce-hearted his
hammer knew. He slew Thrym, the Thursar’s (giant’s) lord, and the
Jötun’s race crushed he utterly.’
At another time Thor engages Alvîs, ‘of the race of the Thursar,’[122]
in conversation upon all manner of topics, concerning the names which
different natural objects bear among men, among gods, among giants, and
among dwarfs, until he guilefully keeps him above earth till after
sunrise, which it is not possible for a dwarf or Jötun to do and live.
So Alvîs bursts asunder.[123] This tale shows clearly enough how much
Thor’s enemies are allied with darkness.
Thor is not always so successful. In another of his journeys[124] the
giants play a series of tricks upon him, quite suitable to the Teutonic
conception of the cold north, as a place of magic, glamour, and
illusion. One giant induces the thunderer to mistake a mountain for him,
and to hurl at _it_ the death-dealing bolt--his hammer Mjölnir.
Afterwards he is set to drain a horn which he supposes he can finish at
a draught, but finds that after the third pull at it, scarcely more than
the rim has been left bare; at the same time Loki engages in an eating
match with one Logi, and is utterly worsted. But in reality Thor’s horn
has reached to the sea, and he has been draining at that; while the
antagonist of Loki is the devouring fire itself. Next Thor is unable to
lift a cat from the ground, for it is in truth the great Midgard serpent
which girds the whole earth. Finally he is overcome in a wrestling match
with an old hag, whose name is Ella, that is Old Age or Death. Enough
has been said in these stories to show how directly the cloak of Thor
descends to the heroes of our nursery tales, Jack the Giant Killer and
Jack of the Bean-Stalk.
Not unconnected with the sun-god are the mythical heroes of northern
poetry, the Perseus or Theseus of Germany and Scandinavia. The famous
Sigurd the Volsung, the slayer of Fafnir, or his counterpart Siegfrid of
the Nibelung song, or again the hero of our own English poem
Beowulf,[125] are especially at war with dragons--which represent the
powers of darkness--or with beings of a Jötun-like character. They are
all discoverers of treasure; and this so far corresponds with the
character of Thor that the thunderbolt is often spoken of as the
revealer of the treasures of the earth, and that the sign of it was
employed as a charm for that purpose. And when we read the account of
these adventures we see how entirely unhuman in character most of them
were, and how much the incidents in the drama bear a reminiscence of the
natural phenomena from which they sprang.
This is especially the case with Beowulf. The poem is weird and
imaginative in the highest degree: the atmosphere into which we are
thrown seems to be the misty delusive air of Jötunheim, and the
unearthly beings whom Beowulf encounters must have had birth within the
shadows of night and in the mystery which attached to the wild unvisited
tracts of country. Grendel, a horrid ghoul who feasts on human beings,
whom Beowulf wrestles with (as Thor wrestles with Ella) and puts to
death, is described as an ‘inhabiter of the moors,’ the ‘fen and
fastnesses;’ he comes upon the scene ‘like a cloud from the misty hills,
through the wan night a shadow-walker stalking;’ and of him and his
mother it is said,
‘They a father know not,
Whether any of them was
Born before
Of the dark ghosts.’
They inhabit, in a secret land, the wolves’ retreat, and in ‘windy
ways--
Where the mountain stream
Under the ness’s mist
Downward flows.’
[Sidenote: Wind-myths.]
Of the myths which spring from the wind, and which may therefore be
reckoned the children of Odin, by far the most interesting are those
which attach to him in his part of Psycopomp, or soul-leader, and which
form a part, therefore, of an immense series of tales connected with the
Teutonic ideas of death as they were detailed in the last chapter. There
were many reasons why these occupied a leading place in middle-age
legend. The German race is naturally a gloomy or at least a thoughtful
one: and upon this natural gloom and thoughtfulness the influence of
their new faith acted with redoubled force, awaking men to thoughts not
only of a new life but of a new death. Popular religion took as strong a
hold of the darker as of the brighter aspects of Catholicism, and was
busy grafting the older notions of the soul’s future state upon the
fresh stock of revealed religion. Thus many of the popular notions both
of heaven and hell may be discovered in the beliefs of heathen Germany.
Let us, therefore, abandoning the series of myths which belong properly
to the Aryan religious beliefs as given in Chapter IX. (though upon
these, so numerous are they, we seem scarcely to have begun), turn to
others which illustrate our last chapter. Upon one we have already
touched; Odin, as chooser of the dead, hurrying through the air towards
a battle-field with his troop of shield-maidens, the Valkyriur;[126] or
if we like to present the simpler nature-myth, the wind bearing away the
departing breath of dying men, and the clouds which he carries on with
him in his course. For there is no doubt that these Valkyriur, these
shield-or swan-maidens, who have the power of transforming themselves at
pleasure into birds, were originally none other than the clouds; perhaps
like the cattle of Indra, they were at first the clouds of sunrise. We
meet with such beings elsewhere than in northern mythology. The
Urva_s_i, whose story we have been relating just now, after the
separation from her mortal husband changes herself into a bird and is
found by Pururavas in this disguise, sitting with her friends the
Gandhavas upon the water of a lake. This means the clouds of evening
resting upon the wide blue sky. The Valkyriur themselves, when they have
been married to men, often leave them, as the Indian fairy left her
husband; and lest they should do so it is not safe to restore them the
swan’s plumage which they wore as Valkyriur; should they again obtain
their old equipment they will be almost sure to don it and desert their
home to return to their old life. The Valkyriur, then, are clouds; and
in so far as they appear in the legends of other nations they have no
intimate connection with Odin. But when they are the clouds of sunset,
and when Odin in his character of soul-bearer becomes before all things
the wind of the _setting_ sun (that breeze which so often rises just as
the sun goes down, and which itself might stand for the escaping soul of
the dying day), then the Valkyriur make part of an ancient myth of
death. And almost all the stories of swan-maidens, or transformations
into swans, which are so familiar to the ears of childhood, are related
to Odin’s warrior maidens. If we notice the plot of these stories, we
shall see that in them too the transformation usually takes place at
sun-setting or sunrising. For instance, in the tale of the six swans in
Grimm’s _Household Stories_,[127] the enchanted brothers of the princess
can only reappear in their true shapes just one hour before sunset.
In Christian legends the gods of Asgard, subjected to the changes which
inevitably follow a change of belief, became demoniacal powers; and Odin
the chief god takes the place of the arch-fiend. For this part he is
especially suited by his character of conductor of the souls; if he
formerly led them to heaven, he now thrusts them down to hell. But so
many elements came together to compose the mediæval idea of the devil
that in this character the individuality of Odin is scarcely preserved.
At times a wish to revive something of this personal character was felt,
especially when the frequent sound of the wind awoke old memories; then
Odin re-emerges as some particular fiend or damned human soul. He is the
Wandering Jew, a being whose eternal restlessness well keeps up the
character of the wind blowing where it listeth: or he is, as we have
said, the Wild Huntsman of the Harz, and of many other places.
The name of this last being, Hackelberg, or Hackelbärend (cloak-bearer),
sufficiently points him out as Odin, who in the heathen traditions had
been wont to wander over the earth clad in a blue cloak,[128] and broad
hat, and carrying a staff. Hackelberg, the huntsman to the Duke of
Brunswick, had refused even on his death-bed the ministrations of a
priest, and swore that the cry of his dogs was pleasanter to him than
holy rites, and that he would rather hunt for ever upon earth than go to
heaven. ‘Then,’ said the man of God, ‘thou shalt hunt on until the Day
of Judgment.’ Another legend relates that Hackelberg was a wicked noble
who was wont to hunt on Sundays as on other days, and (here comes in the
_popular_ version) to impress the poor peasants to aid him. One day he
was joined suddenly by two horsemen. One was mild of aspect, but the
other was grim and fierce, and from his horse’s mouth and nostril
breathed fire. Hackelberg turned then from his good angel, and went on
with his wild chase, and now, in company of the fiend, he hunts and will
hunt till the last day. He is called in Germany the _hel-jäger_,
‘hell-hunter.’ The peasants hear his ‘hoto’ ‘hutu,’ as the storm-wind
rushes past their doors, and if they are alone upon the hillside they
hide their faces while the hunt goes by. The white owl, Totosel, is a
nun who broke her vows, and now mingles her ‘tutu’ (towhoo) with his
‘holoa.’ He hunts, accompanied by two dogs (the two dogs of Yama), in
heaven, all the year round, save upon the twelve nights between
Christmas and Twelfth-night.[129] If any door is left open upon the
night when Hackelberg goes by, one of the dogs will run in and lie down
in the ashes of the hearth, nor will any power be able to make him stir.
During all the ensuing year there will be trouble in that household, but
when the year has gone round and the hunt comes again, the unbidden
guest will rise from his couch, and, wildly howling, rush forth to join
his master. Strangely distorted, there lurks in this part of the story
a ray of the Vedic sleep-god Sârameyas.
‘Destroyer of sickness, guard of the house, oh, thou who takest all
shapes, be to us a peace-bringing friend.’
The Valkyriur in their turn are changed by the mediæval spirit into
witches. The Witches’ Sabbath, the old beldames on broomsticks riding
through the air, to hold their revels on the Brocken, reproduce the
swan-maidens hurrying to join the flight of Odin. And, again, changed
once more, ‘Old Mother Goose’ is but a more modern form of a middle-age
witch, when the thought of witches no longer strikes terror. And while
we are upon the subject of witches it may be well to recall how the
belief in witches has left its trace in our word ‘nightmare.’ _Mara_ was
throughout Europe believed to be the name of a very celebrated witch
somewhere in the North, though the exact place of her dwelling was
variously stated. It is highly probable that this name Mara was once a
byname of the death-goddess Hel, and it _may_ be etymologically
connected with the name of the sea (Meer), the sea being, as we have
seen, according to one set of beliefs, the home of the soul.
Odin, or a being closely analogous with him, reappears in the familiar
tale of the Pied Piper of Hameln, he who, when the whole town of Hameln
suffered from a plague of rats and knew not how to get rid of them,
appeared suddenly--no one knew from whence--and professed himself able
to charm the pest away by means of the secret magic of his pipe. But it
is a profanation to tell the enchanted legend otherwise than in the
enchanted language of Browning:--
‘Into the street the piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while;
Then like a musical adept
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled.’
Then the townsfolk, freed from their burden, refused the piper his
promised reward, and scornfully chased him from the town. On the 26th of
June he was seen again, but this time (Mr. Browning has not incorporated
this little fact) fierce of aspect and dressed like a _huntsman_, yet
still blowing upon the magic pipe.
Now it is not the rats who follow, but the children:--
‘All the little boys and girls,
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls,
Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after
The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.’
And so he leads them away to Koppelberg Hill, and
‘Lo, as they reached the mountain side,
A wondrous portal opened wide,
As if a cavern were suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children followed.
And when all were in, to the very last,
The door in the mountain side shut fast.’
[Sidenote: Myths of death and the other world.]
This too is a myth of death. It is astonishing when we come to examine
into the origin of popular tales how many we find that had at first a
funeral character. This Piper hath indeed a magic music which none can
disobey, for it is the whisper of death; he himself is the soul-leading
Hermes (the wind, the piper), or at least Odin, in the same office. But
the legend is, in part at any rate, Slavonic; for it is a Slavonic
notion which likens the soul to a mouse.[130] When we have got this
clue, which the modern folk-lore easily gives us, the Odinic character
of the Piper becomes very apparent. Nay, in this particular myth we can
almost trace a history of the meeting of two peoples, Slavonic and
German, and the junction of their legends. Let us suppose there had been
some great and long-remembered epidemic which had proved peculiarly
fatal to the children[131] of Hameln and the country round about. The
Slavonic dwellers there--and in prehistoric times some Slavs were to be
found as far west as the Weser--would speak of these deaths mythically
as the departure of the mice (_i.e._ the souls), and perhaps, keeping
the tradition, which we know to be universally Aryan, of a
water-crossing, might tell of the mice as having gone to the water. Or
further, they might feign that these souls were led there by a piping
wind-god: he, too, is the common property of the Aryan folk. Then the
Germans coming in, and wishing to express the legend in their
mythological form, would tell how the same Piper had piped away all the
_children_ from the town. So a double story would spring up about the
same event. The Weser represents one image of death, and might have
served for the children as well as for the mice: to make the legend
fuller, however, another image is selected for them, the dark,
‘concealed’ place, namely, Hel, or the cave of Night and Death.
The two images of death which occur in the last story rival each other
through the field of middle-age legend and romance. When we hear of a
man being borne along in a boat, or lying deep in slumber beneath a
mountain, we may let our minds wander back to Balder sailing across the
ocean in his burning ship _Hringhorni_, and to the same Balder in the
halls of Hel’s palace. The third image of death is the blazing pyre
unaccompanied by any sea-voyage. One or other of these three allegories
meets us at every turn. If the hero has been snatched away by fairy
power to save him from dying, and the last thing seen of him was in a
boat--as Arthur disappears upon the lake Avalon--the myth holds out the
hope of his return, and sooner or later the story of this return will
break off and become a separate legend. Hence the numerous
half-unearthly heroes, such as Lohengrin, who come men know not whence,
and are first seen sleeping in a boat upon a river. These are but broken
halves of complete myths, which should have told of the former
disappearance of the knight by the same route. Both portions really
belong to the tale of Lohengrin; he went away first in a ship in search
of the holy grail, and in the truest version[132] returns in like manner
in a boat drawn by a _swan_. In some tales he is called the Knight of
the Swan. He comes suddenly, in answer to a prayer to Heaven for help,
uttered by the distressed Else of Brabant. But he does not return at
once again to the Paradise which has sent him to earth. He remains upon
earth, and becomes the husband of Else, and a famous warrior; and part
of another myth entwines itself with his story. Else must not ask his
name; but she disobeys his imperative command, and this fault parts them
for ever. Here we have Cupid and Psyche, or Prince Hatt and his wife,
over again. The boat appears once more drawn by the same swan; Lohengrin
steps into it, and disappears from the haunts of men. We have already
seen how, through the Valkyriur, the swan is connected with ideas of
death. It remains to notice how they are naturally so connected by the
beautiful legend that the swan sings once only in his life, namely, when
he is leaving it--that his first song is his own funeral melody. A much
older form of the Lohengrin myth is referred to in the opening lines of
_Beowulf_, where an ancestor of that hero is said to have been found, a
little child, lying asleep in an open boat which had drifted, no one
knows whence, to the shore of Gothland.
Death being thus so universally symbolized by the River of Death, it is
easy to see the origin of the myth that ghosts will not cross living
water. It meant nothing else than that a ghost cannot return again to
life. Even witches cannot do so, as we know in the case of Tam
O’Shanter, that when he reached the Brig’ o’ Doon the pursuit was
baffled.
Many are the impressive stories connected with the myth of the soul’s
transit over water--be it a River or a Sea of Death. In the dark days
which followed the overthrow of the Western Empire, when all the
civilization of its remoter territories had melted away, there grew up
among the fishermen of Northern Gaul a wild belief that the Channel
opposite them was the mortal river, and that the shores of this island
were the asylum of dark ghosts. The myth went, that in the villages of
the Gaulish coast the fishermen were summoned by rotation to perform the
dreadful task of ferrying over the departed spirits. At night a knocking
was heard on their doors, a signal of their duties, and when they
approached the beach they saw boats lying deep in the water as though
heavily freighted, but yet to _their_ eyes empty. Each stepping in, took
his rudder, and then by an unfelt wind the boat was wafted in one night
across a distance which, rowing and sailing, they could ordinarily
compass scarcely in eight. Arrived at the opposite shore (our coast),
they heard names called over, and voices answering as if by rota, and
they felt their boats becoming light. Then when all the ghosts had
landed they were wafted back to Gaul.[133]
The belief in the passage by the soul over a ‘Bridge’ which is the
bridge over the River of Death is as universal almost as the notion of
that River of Death itself. Many creeds see that bridge in the Milky
Way. The Vedic hymns do so. They call the Milky Way by many names, of
which the most common is the path of Yama, the way to the house of Yama,
and Yama is the ruler of the Dead--‘a narrow path,’ as we have already
quoted.
‘A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches thither,[134] a path untrodden
by men, a path I know of.’
The Persians, too, knew the bridge under the name of Kinvad or Chinvad.
And from the Persians the Mohammedans get the same notion, which is
embodied in the Koran. There the Bridge of Death is called Es-Sirat. It
is finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword, along which,
nevertheless, the soul of the good Moslem will be snatched across like
lightning or like the wind; but the wicked man or the unbeliever will
fall headlong thence into an abyss of fire beneath.
The Norsemen had their Bridge of Souls in the Gjallarbrû, ‘The
Resounding Bridge,’ over which Balder had to ride.[135] And when we read
the mediæval accounts of journeys to the other world, to Purgatory or
Hell, in almost every one we find that the passage over a Bridge--the
Brig’ o’ Dread of the ballad--is a part of the journey.
Among the sleepers underground whose legend reproduces the image of
death as simply a life within the tomb, the most celebrated are Kaiser
Karl in the Unterberg--the under-hill, or hill leading to the
under-world; or, as another legend goes, in the Nürnberg, which is
really the Niederberg (_im niedern Berg_), the down-leading hill; and
Frederick Red-Beard sleeping in like manner at Kaiserslautern, or under
the Rabenspurg (raven’s hill). Deep below the earth the old Kaiser sits,
his knights around him, their armour on, the horses harnessed in the
stable ready to come forth at Germany’s hour of need. His long red beard
has grown through the table on which his head is resting. Once, it is
said, a shepherd chanced upon the cave which leads down to the
under-ground palace, and awoke the Emperor from his slumber. ‘Are the
ravens still flying round the hill?’ asked Frederick. ‘Yes.’ ‘Then must
I sleep another hundred years.’
We cannot speak of all the images of Death which reappear in the popular
tales. Very many of these are taken from the funeral fire. We constantly
meet with stories of maidens who lie (asleep probably) surrounded by a
circle of flame, a hedge of fire. Through this the knight or hero must
ride to awaken his beloved. When Skirnir went down to woo the maiden
Gerda--the winter earth[136]--he found her house all surrounded by such
a hedge of fire. But oddly enough, there is another way of representing
the funeral fire symbolically as a circle of thorns, because thorns were
constantly used to form the funeral pyre of the Northmen. Thence a thorn
hedge takes the place of a hedge of flame, and it, or even a single
thorn, may become the symbol of the funeral fire, and so of death.
Here are two stories in which we see how one image may pass into the
other.
In the tale of Sigurd the Volsung both these symbols are used; when
Sigurd first finds Brynhild she has been pricked by Odin with a
sleep-_thorn_, in revenge, because she took part against his favourite
Hialmgunnar; for she was a Valkyria. Sigurd awakes her. At another time
he rides to her through a circle of fire which she has set round her
house, and which no other man dared face. In the myth of Sigurd, twice
as it were riding through death to Brynhild, we see first of all a
nature-myth precisely of the same kind as the myth of Freyr and Gerda
(p. 230),[137] precisely the reverse of the myth of Persephone. Brynhild
is the dead earth restored by the kiss of the sun, or of summer.
Afterwards the part of Brynhild is taken by the Sleeping Beauty, and
Sigurd becomes the prince who breaks through the thorn-hedge. Observe
one thing in the last story. The prick from the sleep-thorn becomes a
prick from a spinning-wheel, and thus loses all its original meaning,
while the circle of fire is transformed into a thorn-hedge--proof
sufficient that they were convertible ideas.
Lastly, it remains to say that the stories of glass mountains ascended
by knights are probably allegories of death--heaven being spoken of to
this day by Russian and German peasants as a glass mountain.